Rienzi Crusz

As a young child Crusz's family moved to Colombo, where he attended high school at St. Joseph's and St. Peter's colleges. Crusz's education was in English, and he was exposed to much of the canon of Western literature including Shakespeare, Milton, and Dylan Thomas (to whom he is sometimes compared), which would later influence his writing. Nonetheless, his poetry cites Sri Lanka as a place of memory and longing, Buddhism in "Karma" and other poems, the sounds of the rabana drum and classical Sri Lankan dance, though as he said in a 2014 interview that his work is "not a travel book". His Catholic upbringing would also heavily influence his poetry especially "Gambolling with the Divine".

Crusz went on to publish more volumes of poetry,"Singing against the Wind" (1985, reissued in 2005), A Time for Loving (1986), Still Close to the Raven (1989, reissued in 2008), The Rain Doesn't Know me Anymore (1992), Beatitudes of Ice (1995; reissued in 2008) and Insurgent Rain: Selected Poems 1974–1996 (1997) before publishing Lord of the Mountain: The Sardiel Poems (1999),"Love Where the Nights are Green" (2007) "Enough to be Mortal Now" (2009), "Don't tell me that I'm not an elephant" (2012), "How to Dance in this Rarefied Air" (2017). "In the Twilight of my Bones", a manuscript of new and unpublished poems, is awaiting publication.

Elephant and Ice, Crusz's second collection of poetry, was published in 1980 and reissued in a limited edition in 2005 of 500 numbered and signed copies. It has been most used to examine Crusz's comparisons of Canada and Sri Lanka. Crusz's work is full of dualities, the most apparent being that of his "negotiation" of Canada and Sri Lanka and where he stands in relation to each country. Even the title of this book is binary, with Elephant standing for Sri Lanka and Ice for Canada. The critic Arun Mukherjee writes in the essay "Songs of an Immigrant" that Crusz's binaries show that he is divided in his loyalties and that he uses his Sri Lankan past to "scrutinize his life in Canada". As a post-colonial poet, Crusz questions both homelands, Sri Lanka and Canada, but makes little reference to his time in England as a student.

Flesh and Thorn, put into print in 1974 with pen and ink drawings by Virgil Burnett, is Crusz's first published collection of poetry. Although much of Crusz's work has been described as autobiographic, it is Flesh and Thorn that most resounds with Crusz's personal life.

Crusz also published several non-fiction books, of note is Ralph Nader: a Bibliography, 1960–1982, published at a time (first-edition, 1973) when Ralph Nader's views against triumphant consumerism were gaining understanding among the public.

Crusz received a Bachelor of Arts in history at the University of Colombo in 1948. In 1951 Crusz went to England to study library science at the School of Librarianship and Archives at the University of London as a Colombo Plan Scholar. After returning from England Crusz worked at the Central Bank of Ceylon as chief reference librarian until immigrating to Canada in 1965. Crusz earned a Bachelor of Library Science at the University of Toronto after his arrival, and then attained a Master of Arts in History at the University of Waterloo. He remained at the University of Waterloo until 1993 as a senior reference and collections development librarian. His library work greatly influenced his non-fiction publications.

Rienzi Crusz (17 October 1925 - 8 September 2017) was a Canadian poet. Born in Galle, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Crusz immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1965 and soon after began publishing poetry. Though his poetry deals with a wide variety of human experience, Crusz is best known for his poetry that illuminates his experience of immigration, migrancy and the alienation of exile.

Lord of the Mountain is an anomaly among Crusz's works, a mixed genre (prose and poetry) work about the life, trial and death of the Sri Lankan Robin Hood, Sardiel. Sardiel was a famous Sri Lankan bandit of the mid-nineteenth century who robbed from the rich to help the poor. He was captured and hanged in 1864. Sardiel is generally celebrated in Sri Lanka as a national hero; many stories and articles have been written about him and he is a favourite story of Sri Lankan children